Networking

Went the other day to a job interview, and it was quite interesting. Was trying to apply more towards a specialised role in the network sector of IT. Had 2 questions come up which stumped me and I never heard of before. They asked what was 802.1X and SFP, and all i could say is 802.1X is a IEEE standard and SFP was some type of module which goes into a cisco switch/router . A few other questions they asked was what VLAN is and how it worked which i managed to explain quite clearly as i have done it in the CCNA training.

Few days passed and I managed to get the role, which I was really happy with. I did some research of what 802.1X and SFP was and managed to come up with this:

802.1X – Port based authentication, which you can setup on a VLAN etc and then have a Radius server which provides you authentication to the network. If you cannot authenticate, you cannot use the network basically, if radius server rejects.

SFP – Optical type transceiver which is plugable into switches/routers etc. They support SONET/Gig Ethernet/Fiber Chanel standards. Apparently they can do up to 4.25Gbits. I am used to the term GBiC when i worked with HP switches, so when SFP popped up was like what was that 😐